The Oral History Section of the Marine Corps History Division manages the oral history program. Its mission is documenting Marine Corps historical events and developments through the spoken word. The oral history program began in 1965 as the Marine Corps became heavily involved in Vietnam. The focus was, and remains, interviewing Marines involved in current operations, or field histories.

As a result, the program has produced a large collection of field interviews that capture Marine perspectives and experiences in operations and developments from 1965 to the current time. The collection also contains interviews with veteran Marines who speak of events and activities as far back as the Spanish-American War.

Another priority mission of the oral history program is collecting career-length interviews of ranking Marine leaders, and other distinguished Marines. The transcripts produced from these interviews are fully transcribed, edited, indexed and bound to produce a valuable and useful reference product.

The oral history section also accepts donations from individuals or organizations that interview Marines, or others’, whose interviews add to the accumulated knowledge of Marine Corps history. We do require that donated interviews be of good quality and provide useful historical information. We also ask that individuals who wish to donate to the Marine Corps oral history collection follow our guidelines and processing procedures (see below).

In recent years a large scale digitization effort has been in effect. As a result most of our oral history products are now in a digital format. Because of the various collection activities, the oral history collection consists of approximately 35,000 interviews that cover the spectrum of historical events in which Marines have been involved throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.